Distant Objects
by deadcell
Summary: Trapped in the rubble of Sector 7 after the plate drop, Reno's got nothing to do but wait and think.


**Distant Objects**

You're looking for pictures in the sky.

You know that help is coming, that Tseng _will_ send someone for you—probably already has, and you hope it's Rude, because no one ought to see you like this except the one who knows you best, the one who knows how to deal with you each and every time you're broken.

You can feel the skin on the side of your face tightening as the blood there begins to dry and congeal; the taste of it metallic in your mouth, the breeze from the now-exposed air up there cooling the sweat on your skin where it slicks down the side of your neck and it itches, though you can't move to scratch it even if you tried. You assume your arms are broken, make no attempt to test them out, useless appendages on the body you now view as a failed mechanical system, slowly shutting itself down. You are nothing but consciousness now, and barely so: you try not to focus on the fact that you can't quite feel your body and _where the fuck are they, this didn't go as planned; something went wrong somewhere, someone was at a wrong rendezvous spot or something_. That someone was probably you, but you can't quite wrap your head around it because you _never_ get things wrong; you pride yourself on the fact that your directives are always carried out calculated and flawless, but there was something about the noise that must have been too much, too distracting; the noise and the ground shifting beneath your feet and the lurching in your stomach as gravity seemed to pull at you from every side at once, your very cells disengaging like fragile matter in a centrifuge even as you ran. That's what you last remember—running—down, looking for the way out, faster and more desperate than you'd ever ran in your life, holding the wet place over your ribs where you'd taken a mercifully shallow slash from a buster sword, e-mag rod slapping against your body dull and hard where it dangled careless from the strap around your wrist. And nothing was chasing you except for your conscience and a sequence of numbers flashing over and over in your brain in the order you pressed their respective keys.

Your fingers twitch.

You count backwards from 100, get all the way to 1 and think with every ragged breath that _if an AVALANCHE survivor is here they'll fucking kill me, see the blue suit and well, that's that_. You try to shrug it off, hear nothing but silence and the crackling of stray rubble as it tumbles and falls somewhere, clatter of concrete and metal coupled with the rustle of things blowing around in the wind, no doubt the mangled fragments of someone's former life. The air is mottled with dust; it hurts to breathe and when you start to cough the panic comes along with the pain, in waves, oppressive, heavy, something sharp inside you starting to vibrate and crack. You try to focus on something, anything, the dirt or the shingles or that severed arm over there. You think of your partner, his face, think _Rude where the fuck are you_ before you focus your eyes back onto the sky.

You've got time to kill, so you look for pictures there, in the black void above you, though you find yourself distracted by the erroneous assumption that the stars are helicopter searchlights, knowing full well that they're way too small and you must be delusional, feverish, imagining things there in the distance. You look for constellations, hoping to pick out the shapes, invisible threads weaving the stars together into images and scenes in aerial locations you can't remember.

Rude taught you some of them one night when you were walking home and skies were clear and he knew you'd _never been out in the country or nothin_ so he showed you the type of entertainment he'd grown up with. While you were out fighting and stealing and fucking somewhere along the path your childhood followed in a darkened Sector, he was out there somewhere safe and calm and alone looking at stars, and at the time you laughed and said _that's fuckin weird who does that_ _anyway_, trying to ignore the chaotic feeling thumping in your brain when he gently placed his hand on your arm, moved you just so, positioned you so that when you looked up together you'd be there, right in the middle of Leviathan, the beast spread across pinpricks of white light poking through the black, the lines of its form following Rude's finger where he pointed, from behind you, over your shoulder. And when he half-whispered _can you see it_ in a soft breath against your ear, you thought about how unnecessarily close his body was to yours, fought the shiver in your spine and the urge to lean back into him and said _yeah—yeah, I can see it_.

Bahumut, Ramuh, Shiva; all images you search for now, but the sky is too dim and you're disoriented. You talk to the stars, beg them _brighter, oh please get brighter_, because you feel that they're fading and something tells you that when they finally disappear, you will too. The sound of your own voice is a foreign mumble rolling off a tongue dumb, heavy, stuck.

You lie there and stare at it, finally visible from what was Sector Seven; trying to focus on how beautiful it is, how these piles of dead bastards around you spent their whole lives missing out. You try to imagine what they would have said if they were alive right now, looking up for the first time, expressions of joy and wonder on their faces so hard to place on downtrodden slummers that you have to think of them as masks.

You are alone, too proud to scream, focusing with all your strength on distant objects, and your eyes close, involuntary, the beat of your anxious heart drumming in your ears and all that's left to do is breathe, wait, hope. _Breathe_.


End file.
